ByBlocks, produced by ByFusion from non-recyclable plastic waste.
The Buzz for August 16, 2024
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This is the final in a three-part series looking at the 3 Rs: recycle, reduce, reuse.
Many plastics are notoriously hard to recycle. Goods from single use grocery bags to berry containers are frequently on the list of items that recyclers call wish-cycled goods, products that people put into recycling bins but aren't actually recyclable. But a handful of projects in Arizona are making that wish come true, giving hard to recycle plastics a second life.
The US Environmental Protection Agency said that in 2018, plastic accounted for about 12 percent of municipal solid waste, with less than nine percent of that waste finding a second life via recycling.
"Back in the day, when they started talking about recycling, people didn't know what to put in their bins. It was like, 'Is it just the bottles? Can I put in my garden furniture? Can I put my car's old bumper in it? Those are the sort of questions. The answer in most of those cases was no," said Ethar Alali, Managing Director of the UK-based firm AutoMedi.
Officials announced late last year that AutoMedi will work with the Phoenix-area suburb of Surprise to recycle plastic waste into filament for 3D printers that will be available around the city.
Alali said the company has managed to recycle virtually every kind of plastic it has been given through this process.
"If you're not sure, give it to us, we'll find a way. That's basically what we try and do. And that means it is a much bigger project, and some of the solutions we don't know yet, because we haven't received every single possible type of product.I mean, I don't think we've received anything like doll heads yet or dolls wigs and all things like that. We've received] a lot of really weird stuff. "
That includes products that were contaminated with spoiled food, lawn furniture, buckets, even pieces of cars.
The company's operation in Surprise is not operational yet, and city officials did not have an estimated date for when they would be able to make 3D printers that utilize the recycled filament available to the public.
Farther south, a company is already turning some plastic waste into new products.
ByFusion began an agreement with Tucson in 2023. They turn hard-to-recycle plastics into construction blocks that can be used for projects as large as building structures.
"The support from the government leaders in the community has been overwhelmingly positive," said ByFusion CEO Heidi Kujawa. "ByBlock is designed to be one of the most versatile building materials on the market. It's not a monolithic building material. It's designed to help us reduce our dependence on cement and lumber, but not necessarily replace it."
The company has provided blocks for a handful of projects in Tucson, ranging from a planter in front of the Ward 6 office (an office long held by former council member Steve Kozachik, who was instrumental in putting together the agreement with ByFusion) to a 72-foot wall in Mission Garden near A Mountain.
"Typically, what happens is, once the material gets into the roll off bins, the roll off bins are then compressed into bales. They're sent to us. We process those into blocks. We stick those blocks back on a truck and headed to the job site, back to Tucson."
That means plastic is hauled by truck from Tucson to Los Angeles and back, but the drive will get much shorter in 2025 when ByFusion opens a facility at the Los Reales Sustainability Campus.
"My goal is right around the groundbreaking of the new facility, we're aiming to have that launched so that people can start consuming some of the products locally," she said.
While ByFusion can also make use of nearly all plastics, it still deals with waste that contaminates the plastic.
"There's a couple of drop off locations that are near industrial sites or scrap yards. So oftentimes we'll get a pallet of material that's basically got a half of a car in it or half of a lawnmower, or crazy stuff, you would be surprised by the crazy stuff that we see. But anything, think about it in terms of anything that's non-plastic, or it's very contaminated with food, you know, don't send me, or moldy loaf of bread," Kujawa said.
During our interview, Kujawa mentioned a diversion report. That can be found below.
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